NBA Leveraged Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese To Get More Money In Media-Rights Deal

There’s never been a better time to be a fan of the WNBA.

The league recently agreed to a lucrative media-rights deal with Disney, NBCUniversal and Amazon that runs through the 2035-36 season and will feed hundreds of millions of dollars back into the WNBA each year.

But perhaps the most intriguing part of the negotiations came when the NBA leveraged the popularity of Indiana Fever rookie phenom Caitlin Clark and Chicago Sky rookie star Angel Reese to get the streaming giant to up its offer by $75 million per year for the WNBA’s streaming rights, according to Colin Salao of Front Office Sports.

“The three partners did not assign a value for the WNBA when negotiating the broader $77 billion deal with the NBA, and the recommendation of a media-consulting team from Endeavor Group — which owns the WWE and UFC — valued the WNBA at just $125 million per year,” Salao wrote . “The NBA insisted on more — citing he league’s exponential growth this year upon the arrival of rookies Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese — which led to the $200 million-per-year figure.”

There’s no denying the impact that Clark and Reese’s mega-celebrity status has given the WNBA. The duo have broken several records for television ratings, attendance numbers and merchandise sales.

WNBA chief growth officer Colie Edison recently stated the league’s average viewership, which hadn’t reached 1 million viewers in the past 16 seasons, is right around 1.2 million viewers this year.

The two most-watched non-All-Star games this year have featured Clark’s Fever against Reese’s Sky, and Clark herself has been featured in the 15 most-watched WNBA games this season. In fact, her and Reese making their WNBA All-Star debuts led to this year’s event being the most-watched All-Star game in league history with 3.4 million viewers.

Clark and Reese also have the No. 1 and 2 best-selling jerseys, respectively, this season, and WNBA merchandise sales as a whole is up 500% through the first half of the season compared to last season, according to Fanatics.

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